Finding Stations

When the IRA is turned on and connects to the network, it scans and downloads a new version of the station directory. Thus, when a new station comes 'on the air', it will take only 24 hours or so until your IRA knows about it. There are currently over 11,000 stations listed and you can see the full directory of stations available here. If your favorite isn't in there, there's also a facility for suggesting additions located here.

The IRA can also connect to Podcasts, so you can keep up with the latest and greatest happenings around the Internet. The screen doesn't do video, so you'll only be able to listen to the audio portion.

Figure 9: This is the main menu for the Internet Radio portion of IRA. The Station List entry allows you to review and select stations based on a number of criteria.

Figure 10: There are lots of ways to find new stations...

Figure 11: Once you select a region of the earth, you can search by various genres or, as shown by the top selection, simply scroll through a list of all stations available for the region.

Sound Quality

The sound quality of the IRA is very good. Frequency response and channel separation are excellent (as we'd expect from a digital source). The volume output level is a bit low though. Generally, I have to set the IRA's volume level to 15 (out of 20) and my Yamaha receiver to -15db to get reasonable listening volume in my living room. With other sources, the Yamaha would be blasting the walls off at -15db, so I think there needs to be a bit more juice coming out the back of the IRA. Admittedly, this also seems to be station dependent, since I needed to decrease the IRA volume a couple of notches on some of the Country stations my wife listens to.

One enhancement I would love to see in a future version of the IRA is a digital audio output feed so we could avoid the digital-to-analog conversion, and maybe hear some 4,5.1 or 7.1 sound!

Day-to-Day Use

Day-to-day use of the IRA couldn't be simpler. When you turn it on, it immediately reloads the last station you were listening to.

As can be seen from the screen shots, the interface of the IRA is a white on blue format using fonts we haven't seen since the 80s. The menu layout is straightforward and intuitive, making it easy and quick to navigate, but the size of the screen (which is fairly small), coupled with the font size and colour combination make it difficult to see from more than about 2 or 3m (6 to 8 feet) from the unit.

The remote is a typical infrared device with a range good enough to span most living/entertainment rooms. Response to the button pushes isn't quite as snappy as I'd like it, but it was consistent.

The WiFi receiver in the IRA is much better than the ones in most of my laptops and phone/PDAs! My house has central heating, and the ducts and wiring between floors cause havoc with the WiFi signals, so for most units, I'm barely able to retain connection one floor up and at the other end of the house. The IRA however, was easily able to connect even further away -- out on the back porch -- providing a clear, clean output.

Figure 12: When the IRA is in the Off mode, it diplays the current date and time (if you've set it manually, or have picked it up automatically from the Internet). After a short while, the backlight will extinguish, but if you wish, there is a system setting to have the backlight remain on permanently.

Figure 13: I found the Last Listened menu to be really helpful as I found new stations I'd never heard of before. Internet radio is a great way to discover music and cultures you don't normally have access to.

Figure 14: When listening to a station, the screen shows the call letters in a bigger font, which helps, followed by any ID text the station carries, such as "All country, all the time", etc.

Conclusion

Myine's IRA opened up a whole new vista for me. I was leery about whether my WiFi network had the bandwidth to handle streaming audio, but the quality of the sound was excellent and there were no dropouts, even while my sons were downloading videos and playing XBox Live (TM). I'm now looking forward to discovering new stations for our various moods, with fewer worries about fuzzy or fading signals, and far fewer commercials. It was kind of cool to hear what was happening this weekend on Manitoulin Island...

Don Tolson is an Associate Director with Fujitsu Consulting, located in Victoria, BC, Canada. In past lives, he was a musician (strictly amateur!) and sound director for local theatre groups, so he spend a lot of time in the early days of stereo and quadraphonics (anyone remember that?) trying to get reasonable sound from bargain-basement components :-).

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